The world's oldest still-operational planetarium was created to
disprove the end of the world. In May 1774, the Frisian clergyman Eelco
Alta published a book on an impending planetary alignment, declaring
this "a preparation or a commencement of the demolishing or destruction"
of the universe. In an age when afflictions such as headaches were
often attributed to malign heavenly influences, Alta's prediction
quickly caught on: edgier Dutch bards began composing doomsday songs,
and other printers rushed to cash in on mounting public panic.
Among those not swept away was the wool-comber and hobbyist
astronomer Eise Eisinga, who allegedly chose this moment to begin work
on a clockwork solar system, hoping to demonstrate the absurdity of such
prophecies and free his countrymen of their superstitions. The result,
hammered into the floors and ceilings of Eisinga's own house, is both
an extraordinarily precise astronomical instrument and a consoling
abstraction of the vast, eerie void in which Earth is enmeshed.
Wire-hung planets painted gold on their sunward sides whirr faithfully
across a royal blue empyrean, spattered with Zodiac signs like leaves
across a lake's surface.
There's a bit of both Eisinga and Alta in Outer Wilds - a
beautifully mechanical, wistful outer spacey campfire yarn in which you
scour a condensed, toybox solar system for the key to its salvation. It
gives you Eisinga's benign and well-behaved cosmos, with nobbly,
kilometre-wide planets strung to their orbits like rosary beads on your
ship's map computer. Their directions of travel and relative velocities
are likewise marked on your helmet interface, so that you can match
speeds with a button press and begin the fiddly process of landing,
using the Apollo Lander-style fisheye camera on your ship's belly. It's a
gleaming pocketwatch of a setting, many times smaller than the galaxies
of Mass Effect, yet somehow far larger for the cleverness and tactility
of its moving parts. But it is also a place of violent change.
Zoom from the celestial circles of the map screen and you'll
discover that each planet is a scene of rapid upheaval. On one oceanic
world, bottle-green cyclones launch whole islands briefly into the
atmosphere, carrying the player along with them; time it just right, and
you might spring-board to a chunk of broken space station while
investigating an old dockyard. There's a planet whose crust falls apart
beneath your feet as it is battered by lava boulders ejected by its own
moon, exposing something rather terrifying at its core. There's a pair
of worlds that suck monstrous volumes of sand from one another,
revealing sunken structures on one while burying them (and you, if you
outstay your welcome) on the other. Each planet has its own gravity,
moreover, so that a casual hop on one may risk launching you into space,
where a slight fall on another might kill you. Fire a probe at the
horizon and you'll see it arc around the planet, like Isaac Newton's
cannon ball, according to the strength of the pull. Park your ship on a
comet with barely any mass and it may slide off the rear.
The biggest shock of all, though, comes 20 minutes in, when the
solar system's sun abruptly goes supernova - collapsing with a sound
like massed inhalation then surging outward in a blinding wall of blue
fire. Fortunately for all creatures within the blast radius, your
character - the newest member of a space programme that feels closer to a
hiking association than NASA - manages to get stuck in a mysterious
time loop while fetching the launch codes for their maiden voyage. Every
time you die, be it thanks to the sun, a pocket of lethal "ghost
matter" or a surprise tête-à -tête with the comet, you're dumped safely
back at a campfire on your home world of Timber Heart. Not all is lost
on reset, however: your ship's computer keeps a record of your doings in
each playthrough and weaves them into a spider diagram of lore
connections. In the process, you piece together a timeline of the events
immediately preceding the supernova, learning where you need to be and
when to avert disaster.
Unusually for a game featuring a timeloop, there's no secret linear
progression element in the form of ability unlocks and upgrades that
persist across sessions. You'll use the same tools throughout, and if
they seem rather eccentric, they're actually quite straightforward. The
heart of it all is your spaceship, a three-legged, boiler-powered
packmule of a vessel that can manoeuvre across 360 degrees. Equipped
with a limitless energy supply, it's tough enough to weather a few
crash-landings and comes with an autopilot to help you fumble your way
into each planet's orbit (bear in mind, though, that the autopilot has
no qualms about taking a shortcut through the sun).
The ship houses your second most precious belonging, a space suit,
which packs around 10 minutes of oxygen and a jetpack. Run out of juice
for the latter, and the suit will automatically switch to expelling
oxygen for propulsion, so you'll need to keep an eye on both gauges
while tackling the tricky platforming routes that predominate on
certain, less stable planets. Fortunately, oxygen is automatically
replenished wherever you find trees, which create a magic little oasis
of breathable air. Together with your ponderous movement, the survival
elements might have been aggravating nonetheless, but given that you
only have 20 minutes to burn before you and everything else are wiped
out, there's simply not enough time to find them annoying. Ultimately,
the problem of oxygen and fuel is acute enough to make reconnaissance
suspenseful without becoming a full-scale drain on your sanity.
Other tools are less essential, their applications specific to
certain puzzles, but always entertaining to fool around with; there's
the faint echo of Beyond Good & Evil in their bulbous, grabbable
visual design. You can launch sticky camera probes at surfaces that
serve as light sources and hazard detectors, recalling them by squeezing
a shoulder button. Your trusty signalscope, meanwhile, allows you to
pinpoint transmissions like escape pod distress calls from kilometres
away. These signals include the snatches of music played by other
members of Timber Hearth's space programme at their campsites on each
planet, each strain a component of the game's main theme. I haven't
quite managed this, but I suspect if you find a vantage point from which
to line up your scope on all these wayfarers at once, you'll hear the
complete song. It's the Music of the Spheres recreated with harmonica
and banjo, and the most winning of the game's efforts to blend the
loneliness of spaceflight with the ambience of a cook-out under the
stars.
Last but not least, there's your point-and-click universal
translator, used to decode messages left by an advanced precursor
civilisation, the Nomai, whose buildings and relics suffuse every planet
you'll come across. The Nomai's presence takes the overarching plot in
some familiar directions, but I never tired of reading their messages -
partly because the writing is both charmingly oddball and to-the-point,
and partly thanks to the game's quietly imaginative representation of an
alien script, which reveals something of the long-evaporated society
and modes of cognition at stake. Nomai messages are written mostly on
walls in glowing, sapphire spirals, which branch and bud across the
tiles as other scribes chime in with objections and alternatives,
exclamations and banter, splintering the opening thought off into
parallel discussions. It's a wonderful device that conveys the
sensibilities of the elder culture far more effectively than the details
of each message. I hope other sci-fi backstory writers take note.
One thing you'll soon learn about the Nomai is that they're as
fascinated by the machinations that engulf them as you are. There's a
twofold joy to Outer Wilds - the thrill of discovery itself, as you
slowly decipher the variables that swirl around each not-so-distant
world, and of seeing that thrill reflected in a phrase scribbled
centuries ago by some castaway alien boffin. It gives the game that
feeling of displaced community, of mutual striving across the extinction
barrier, you might otherwise associate with the Vigil scene in Mass
Effect or feats of translation in the recent, excellent Heaven's Vault.
Moreover, the game's pint-sized solar system is full of models of
itself, from the star lifecycle models you'll find in your home planet's
observatory, to the holographic sandtray projections and swivelling,
Stone Henge-scale orreries left behind by the Nomai. It's a setting
mesmerised by its own intricacies, and it wants you to share in that
delight. Whatever their differences on the subject of the apocalypse, I
like to think that both Eisinga and Alta would have enjoyed it.
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